Christopher Pemberton

 

Christopher Pemberton paints the landscape he knows in Suffolk and Normandy. Two large panoramas stand out as heroic achievements.

One of them called ‘Tot de Bas, Evening’ measures 42” x 60” and is painted against the light. When he showed me his picture I was reminded of Constable’s remark on Gainsborough’s pictures in a lecture: “On looking at them we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them”. My feelings must have been stirred by the rendering of that great tract of countryside and the association of devotion and passion that went into it.

 

Some of the surface remains as white canvas which seems to take us back in time to the beginning of the summers between 1980 and 1983 (“with a little epilogue four years later”). He regards the naked white canvas as a spatial element you can move about in. From a state of flux, gradually, over different days and weather conditions, he finds essential structure. Throughout the situation is kept open and the picture grows in certainty. The patchwork (mosaic) of houses and fields become more dense and intricate, more stubbornly stated till the colours smash against one another in a closely wrought web, giving an overall impression of landscape and sky and its ensuing light. Constable spoke of the sky as a white sheet. With Christopher Pemberton one could say the white canvas is a white sheet, and some of it remains, playing its positive role.

 

This white surface becomes part of the dialogue between surface and he spatial envelope of painted forms. In the drawings we can see clearly how he can leave the white to speak for itself, an extension of how Cezanne worked, in contrast to the marks arriving out of his spatial explorations. So we have the element of time, traces of his dogged journey – past, present, and possible future. “It is better to travel hopefully than arrive”.

 

He likes to ‘dwell’, that is to lodge the paint right up against the object. It is this obsessive interest in things in contrast to the air and the light that makes his paintings so strong and assured.

 

Anthony Eyton, RA

In a world of hot house reputations and flimsy brilliance a major display of work combining gravity with gentleness; the distilled product of many years of assiduous restless and felt research into the making, of paintings which rest on the interaction of the inner world of an insistent intelligence, the outer world of Nature and the abstract world of visual language.

 

The pencil and paintbrush weave through the Space, foregoing easy assumptions, never taking no for an answer, demanding only the truest conclusions.

 

Christopher Pemberton is working in the great tradition and this work, long collected by fellow painters (historically invariably the best judges) requires to be assessed by the highest standards.

 

The painter’s long list of preferred artists includes the unassuming objectivity of Coldstream, the passionate involvement of Bomberg; the impassioned objectivity of Cezanne and Rembrandt.
 

Arnold van Praag